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Liveblogging the final debate

McCain had two pretty good debates. Obama had three. I don’t think Obama made any mistakes that can be used against him tonight, though it’s too soon to say. He was fluent and fluid, if not particularly inspiring.

McCain, meanwhile, was just awful — rambling, incoherent at times, ineffective in his attacks, petulant and occasionally angry. This isn’t going to move the polls — certainly not in McCain’s direction.

Best performance of the night: Bob Schieffer. Folksy and charming, and he got out of the way.

11:14 p.m. Wow. CBS News’ insta-poll of uncommitted voters shows Obama winning the debate by a margin of 53 percent to 22 percent. To the extent that you can trust such things, that’s huge. CNN’s insta-poll has similar margins, though it’s slightly skewed toward Democratic voters. And that’s it for tonight. I’ll be rounding up media commentary for the Guardian bright and early.

10:39 p.m. Pundits tying themselves in knots to say nice things about McCain. John King: McCain’s best debate! No way. As CNN went to the break, I could hear Bill Bennett in the background, pimping the lie about Obama and infanticide.

10:28 p.m. Seth gives it to Obama, big-time.

10:27 p.m. Whoa! McCain ends on a sarcastic, snappish note. “Got it — heh, heh.”

10:25 p.m. Why does Sarah Palin know about autism “better than most”? That’s the second time McCain has said that. Is he confusing autism with Down’s?

10:19 p.m. Joe the Plumber hits Twitterspace.

10:16 p.m. Judges and abortion — not a ratings hit. But I wonder how it will play that McCain can barely manage coherently to lodge his accusations, and Obama easily swats them away. McCain’s response: Don’t trust Obama’s “eloquence.” What, he’s supposed to sound tongue-tied?

10:03 p.m. Let the fall health-plan reruns begin. McCain: He’ll fine small businesses! Obama: He’ll tax your insurance! And all of it aimed at Joe the Plumber. What about me?

9:59 p.m. Joe the Plumber! Time for a drink.

9:56 p.m. McCain is singing an ode to President Uribe of Colombia, an ally with a dubious record on human rights.

9:47 p.m. Schieffer’s doing pretty well, I think. Brokaw was sour and obsessed with the clock. Schieffer is not only letting them mix it up, but he seems engaged in a positive way.

9:46 p.m. Now drinking Harvest Moon. This debate isn’t worth anything better.

9:45 p.m. McCain just lied about Biden wanting to divide Iraq into “three countries.”

9:41 p.m. Schieffer throws Obama a high knuckleball that doesn’t break: Why is Biden better than Palin? Obama’s now trotting around second base.

9:40 p.m. Here we go on William Ayers and ACORN. Good grief. McCain can barely make a coherent statement tonight. Obama’s response is devastating in a suitably low-key way.

9:34 p.m. You could look it up: I’ve scored the first two debates as a tie. McCain’s coming off as a doddering old coot tonight.

9:32 p.m. Good for Obama. He’s not only not repudiating John Lewis, he’s giving him some cover.

9:31 p.m. Joe the Plumber! Where is he? If he’s in the audience, bring him up.

9:28 p.m. McCain: “You didn’t tell the American people the truth because you didn’t.” Nyah, nyah.

9:25 p.m. Schieffer: You’ve both been naughty. The dread specter of equivalence rears its head.

9:24 p.m. McCain is coming off as rambling and unfocused. Obama’s not at his sharpest, but he’s better than McCain so far. McCain: Name me one thing on which you’ve opposed your party. Obama: Bing, bing, bing.

9:20 p.m. McCain is peppering Obama with scattershot charges. Should Obama respond to each one, or take a broader approach? He seems to be opting for the broader approach.

9:12 p.m. Plumbers make more money than lefthanded relief specialists. I mean, they deserve it, but I’m not surprised Joe makes more than $250,000 a year.

9:07 p.m. It all comes down to Joe the Plumber.

9:01 p.m. Trader Joe’s microwave popcorn actually tastes like corn.

8:59 p.m. I always get a kick out of seeing the moderator alone on the stage with the crowd dead silent. Thank you, C-SPAN.

This should be interesting. It hasn’t started, and I’m already nodding off on the couch.

Lesson not learned

Seth Gitell explains one of the fundamental mistakes of the McCain campaign:

I know from my own reporting that McCain campaign operatives examined the Deval Patrick-Kerry Healey race in 2006. They saw how Healey’s tough law and order ads not only failed but also sent the campaign into a downward spiral. Those mean-spirited [ads] alienated independent swing voters and had no resonance in what was then very much a “change” election. Yet despite that knowledge they made the same mistake.

Gitell’s right, and there’s a larger theme, too. For 10 years, McCain has been campaigning on the idea that he can offer a higher level of leadership and independence. But when it finally came time to deliver, he turned over the single most important political task he’s ever undertaken to “operatives.”

Everyone’s got operatives. In most successful campaigns, though, the operatives work for the candidate. Conversely, in many losing efforts, the candidate ends up doing whatever the operatives tell him or her. That was certainly the case with the hapless Healey, who, in a matter of two weeks, morphed from respected if little-known moderate to right-wing nut.

There is no such thing as candidates who are better than their campaigns.

Balz puts his thumb on the scale

With three weeks to go, Washington Post political reporter Dan Balz has proposed a truly dangerous idea: subjecting Barack Obama to a tougher level of scrutiny than John McCain on the grounds that Obama is virtually the president-elect.

“McCain is the focus because what was thought to be a close race doesn’t look like one at this moment,” says Balz. “Which is all the more reason that the real focus now ought to be on Barack Obama.”

Guess what? If Obama wins the election, then he’ll be the president-elect. Not until then. Tough questions for both candidates ought to be the goal. Balz’s plea amounts to asking the media to put their thumbs on the scale in order to even things up.

“I’ve heard reporters admit that coverage can be biased for one reason or another — ideology, desire for a close race, personal afinity [sic] for one of the candidates — but I’ve never before seen one openly propose a double standard,” writes Jonathan Chait of The New Republic.

Obama supporters ought to be wary going into tonight’s debate, which will kick off the final leg of this endless campaign. The McCain-Palin operation has fallen apart during the past few weeks, leaving Obama with what appears to be a big lead in the polls. But members of the media don’t like telling the same story day after day, week after week. And some influential players — Balz has already signaled that he’s one of them — are going to try to change the story.

Eric Alterman reminds us that Howard Fineman of Newsweek and MSNBC has openly admitted that the media turned on Al Gore in 2000 at least in part because they didn’t want to cover his “triumphant march to the presidency.”

The danger tonight is that any minor slip-up by Obama will be magnified — and any mistake by McCain will be ignored.

The Sox are playing? Uh, not really.

How did I not know the Red Sox were playing tonight? I thought it was tomorrow. Anyway, I haven’t watched one moment of this game, and it’s just as well, seeing they’re down 11-1 after six.

I will not count these guys out until they lose four games. But the fact is that this is the thinnest team the Sox have field in quite some time, mainly because of injuries. If you’ve only got three guys hitting, Beckett isn’t Beckett and Lester isn’t Lester, well, the results aren’t going to be good.

Besides, the Rays are a better team than the Sox, or better, at least, than the Sox without Mike Lowell, a healthy David Ortiz, a healthy J.D. Drew … you get the picture. And unlike the Angels, the Rays are tough as nails.

The president and the Boss

A radio station needn’t obtain advance permission before playing a particular song by a particular musician. Same with a nightclub. Under copyright law, you’re free to play copyrighted music as long as you pay a fee.

That goes for politicians, too. In today’s Washington Post, Christopher Sprigman and Siva Vaidhyanathan explain why musicians such as Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart, the Foo Fighters and others have no legal basis in objecting to the McCain campaign’s use of their songs. The campaign, they note, has paid its licensing fees, and that should be the end of it. (Via Altercation.)

It’s a free-speech issue, and, as such, we should be just as vigilant against Jackson Browne’s attempt to censor the Republicans as we are about, say, Sarah Palin’s redefinition of freedom of the press as a “privilege.”

The man who wrote the book on how to respond to an unwanted political embrace was Bruce Springsteen. In 1984, Ronald Reagan, running for re-election, gave a shoutout to Springsteen, whose “Born in the U.S.A.” had set off a boomlet of patriotic fervor. Though in actuality it was a bitter antiwar anthem, the upbeat music had confused more than a few conservatives into thinking Bruce had cast his lot with the “Morning in America” crowd.

Shortly thereafter, Springsteen, at a concert in Pittsburgh, introduced his song “Johnny 99” — about an unemployed auto worker-turned-murderer — with this:

The president was mentioning my name the other day, and I kinda got to wondering what his favorite album musta been. I don’t think it was the ‘Nebraska’ album. I don’t think he’s been listening to this one.

And that was the end of that. (Wikipedia reference verified by my steel-trap memory.)

Update: Looks like some news organizations are pushing an overly restrictive interpretation of copyright law, too — even going so far as to demand that YouTube delete some McCain ads that use news clips.

Photo (cc) by Music Master and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved. And in case you were wondering, yes, that’s a wax figure, not the real Bruce.

Why Ayers instead of Wright?

Tucker Carlson asks something I’ve been wondering myself: Why did the McCain campaign choose to go after Barack Obama’s tenuous ties to the former radical William Ayers instead of revisiting Obama’s long association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright?

Sarah Palin’s accusation that Obama has been “palling around with terrorists” is false on at least two levels: her use of the plural, and her insinuation that Obama had anything more than a passing acquaintance with Ayers.

Yet Obama has clearly been disingenuous about his long, close relationship with Wright, whose “God damn America!” exhortation was one of the recurring hits of the primary campaign. You don’t title your campaign book after one of Wright’s sermons and sit in his church for 20-something years without knowing what the man is about.

Given the McCain campaign’s lie-and-deny tactics, it doesn’t seem likely that it was too worried about the Palin family’s own association with the radical Alaskan Independence Party, whose founder’s motto — “I’ve got no use for America or her damned institutions” — exceeds Wright in its anti-American vitriol.

So why Ayers and not Wright? It is a mystery. If you’re going to go negative, at least do it competently.

Michael Graham’s anti-Obama fakery

I suppose this is like pointing out that the sun rises in the east. But WTKK Radio (96.9 FM) talk-show host Michael Graham is running a fake photo on his blog showing Barack Obama speaking in front of a poster of the Latin American terrorist/’60s icon Che Guevara.

The photo of Obama was taken during his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. It’s been superimposed on a background of Guevara. You may recall that there was a brief controversy some months ago when an Obama volunteer put up a Che poster at the campaign’s Houston headquarters. The campaign, not surprisingly, responded by denouncing Che.

Graham’s deceptive hackery isn’t even original — it was posted here back in February. No doubt Graham will tell us that anyone would know the Obama-Che photo is a fake. But if you listen to his callers, I’m sure you’ll agree that’s a stretch.

The second-best part is that Graham calls his blog “The Natural Truth.” The best part is that Graham is on a crusade to convince people that McCain-Palin supporters aren’t really hate-mongering against Obama. I guess he’ll have to exclude himself.

Two weekends in the Pemi

On Columbus Day weekend in 1998 my friend Brad Johnson and I headed out on what would prove to be one of the more miserable — and productive — backpacking trips of our lives. For three days we hiked in a light but steady rain through the Pemigewasset Wilderness. The temperature hung in the mid-50s throughout the weekend.

On day one, we took the Zealand Trail to the Ethan Pond Trail, followed by a stream crossing so difficult we had to take off our packs and throw them to the other side before we could start hiking along the Thoreau Falls Trail.

For a Flickr slideshow, click here or on photo

We camped near the junction of the Wilderness and Bondcliff trails, telling ourselves that at least our day in the rain had consisted of level hiking. Surely the rain would stop before we started climbing the Bonds the next day.

No such luck. We reached the summits of Bondcliff, Mount Bond and West Bond in clouds and rain, slipping and sliding the whole way. We considered staying at the Guyot Campsite, but, as I recall, it was already full, and we were afraid that if we stopped there we’d have to do more hiking than we should the next day.

So we trudged on, hitting Zealand Mountain and heading for Zealand Falls Hut. We had planned to tent out near the hut. But at that point we were so wet and miserable that I declared my intention to keep right on going to the car if we couldn’t stay at the hut.

Following a steep descent, we arrived at the hut just as darkness was falling, only to be told by one member of the crew — or “croo” — that there were no openings. Another member, though, said that half the people with reservations hadn’t showed up, and let us in. Within moments, we’d changed into semi-dry clothing and were having supper put in front of us. Neither Brad nor I had stayed in an Appalachian Mountain Club hut before, and it was just what we needed following two days in the rain.

The next morning, I wrote an entry in the hut journal, which I actually found and took a photo of this past weekend (above). After breakfast, Brad and I headed out in the rain once again, taking the Lend-a-Hand Trail to the summit of Mount Hale before heading back to our car and home. We’d climbed five of New Hampshire’s 4,000-foot mountains that weekend, putting both of us well on the way to completing all 48.

Media Nation Jr. and I set out this past Friday on a considerably less ambitious hike. Tim is a strong hiker — stronger than I am at this point — but we had both been sick all week.

On Friday we took the very easy hike to the hut along Zealand Trail. We stayed at the hut with the intention of taking a longer hike on Saturday, camping out and returning on Sunday. But we were both still woozy and decided against it. So on Saturday morning we headed to the summit of Mount Hale (photo at left).

While we were loitering at the top, a group of five students from Tufts University arrived. We learned that the Tufts Mountain Club had sent students to hike to the top of all 48 4,000-footers during the weekend. The five students we met had chosen one of the easier mountains, though one with a not-particularly-interesting view.

From there Tim and I descended along the Hale Brook Trail, stopping at the Miss Wakefield Diner on our way home.